ABSTRACT
All families face daily challenges in managing the health of their members. These challenges may range from maintaining a healthy lifestyle (e.g., promoting good eating habits and regular physical activity) to complex medical regimens associated with chronic health conditions. Family health encompasses the activities and beliefs that guide behavior, as individuals face transitions, experience chronic health conditions, adhere to medical regimens, deliberately attempt to prevent disease or complications arising from disease states, and interact with the healthcare community. Family health is not just the absence of disease or symptoms. Rather it is a dynamic process reflecting how the group, as a whole, goes about developing strategies and ideas about what constitutes healthy living and how the group responds to stressful situations brought upon by afflictions as well as normative transitions. Thus, family health is a complex part of life in need of theories that are on the one hand comprehensive enough to account for a variety of circumstances but on the other hand specific enough to make precise predictions about how the family will behave.
